Ghisla Art Collection Foundation

In the heart of Locarno, just steps from the lake and the marina, the Ghisla Art Collection Foundation is today one of the most significant cultural centers in the Swiss art scene. Established in 2014 as a non-profit organization, the Foundation was born from the desire of collectors Martine and Pierino Ghisla to share a heritage of contemporary art of international importance with the public, transforming a private passion into an open and accessible cultural project.

The Foundation's headquarters, a contemporary building designed by the Moro & Moro studio, houses a collection of over 280 works spanning the major artistic movements of the 20th and 21st centuries. Alongside the permanent collection, the Foundation annually presents a program of temporary exhibitions that bring together great masters and contemporary research, consolidating its role as a place of experimentation, discussion, and discovery.

The second temporary exhibition of 2026, "Promenade. The Measure of the Surrounding," is dedicated to the works of artist Elisabeth Scherffig and will run from September 5, 2026, to January 6, 2027. The exhibition traces fifty years of research by the artist, born in Düsseldorf in 1949 and active in Milan since 1971, through works that explore the relationship between architecture and nature, construction and transformation, memory and the present. Construction sites, ruins, quarries, stones, vegetation, and landscapes become the subject of observation and are transformed through drawing, a central element of her artistic practice. Promenade invites visitors to take a stroll through Scherffig's gaze, a journey where photography, drawing, sculpture, and installation narrate the complexity and constant transformation of our surroundings.

Alongside the temporary exhibition, the museum's top floor hosts the 2026 Selection of the Ghisla Collection, a journey that draws on the historical core of the permanent collection. Featuring 34 works by artists who have decisively shaped the last eighty years of art history, the exhibition offers a cross-section of major international movements: from Pop Art to Surrealism, from Spatialism to Graffiti, to the most radical experiments of the late twentieth century. Names such as Jean-Michel Basquiat, Andy Warhol, Roy Lichtenstein, René Magritte, Joan Miró, Pablo Picasso, and Lucio Fontana interact in a display that invites us to reinterpret art history as an open field of relationships and references.

With this double event, the Fondazione Ghisla Art Collection confirms its mission: to be a dynamic place where contemporary research encounters the great chapters of art history, offering Locarno and its visitors a cultural experience of international scope.

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